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Prototyping the hover boots

I’m on a roll with new collectible power ups! I just finished implementing the hover boots, which you can see in action below:

The basic idea of the hover boots is that they allow you to hover briefly in mid-jump or mid-fall. You can only do this once per jump, and it doesn’t last very long. You can also cancel it early for fine control of the effect, and eventually there will be a couple upgrades that make the effect last longer and then as long as you want. Being able to halt in mid air not only makes movement more fun (it really increases your jump distance, but not height), it engenders a bunch of interesting exploration / puzzle possibilities.

I have to confess that I got the idea for this item from the Gargoyle’s Quest series, where it was used really effectively:

Confusingly, the third Gargoyle’s Quest game was called Demon’s Crest, and it’s a relatively unknown sleeper hit for the SNES. Although not really a game about exploration, it has quite a few Metroidvania-like aspects on top of being a great action game. It’s worth a play through, or if you’re lazy you can just watch a speed run of it:

The next power-up ability I’m working on is also a total rip off from other great games. If you think you know what it is, feel free to guess in the comments!

Shit, I forgot until just now that I’d said that. Kinda disappointed it wasn’t the spinning lariat though! j/k

The dash looks great in the video. Nice work there. I was just thinking, since some enemies damage you upon contact, it might make sense to allow a dash into an enemy to damage both the player and the enemy. Sort of a kamakaze situation. Once your health gets higher, assuming that will be possible (energy tanks and all that), you could dash through weaker enemies as a convenience, knowing you’ll take some damage but not caring.